Our Journey...

The name “Muslin Trail“ symbolizes the philosophy of the brand to work at grassroots level & stem migration from Indian villages, giving opportunities to the weavers to stay & earn in their native lands. Today much of the original Weaver community of India prefers their younger generation to take up city jobs & not carry forward their traditions, leading to crafts being forgotten with time. The prevalence of Powerloom replicas of Indian weaves further obliterates age-old weaves, once hand-crafted by the Artisans.

Muslin Trail, a For-Profit Social Venture by Navanita Dutta Chowdhury, strives to revive age-old Weaves & Textile Techniques, bringing Heritage Indian Weaves to new generations. A NIFTian with the recipient of several prestigious awards, she was a part of the Nalli Brand, for nearly a decade.

Every time she visited a unit as a part of her job, she found one or more weavers missing. They left for small odd jobs in the city for money and the rich craft had to bear the burnt.

That’s when she realised she isn’t fit for the corporate world and wanted to work at the grassroot level with the weavers. 

Quitting the job in 2018 was not an easy decision. Muslin Trail started the same year with a only 5 weavers and with a dream to revive the lost charm of our drapes and to let the weavers be where they belong, their looms!!

Muslin Trail is working to revive the age old crafts and techniques that have lost its charm with the modern age. Ikals, Kasuti, Pattedanchu, Muslin Jamdani, Patola, Bagru, Sangneri, Kalamkari, Sambhalpuri, Maheshwari, Dongria and the list goes on. These traditional gems of Indian handloom have lost their value with our modern techniques of powerloom and machine printing.

So, a saree or a handcrafted product from Muslin Trail is indeed a trail of love, the love for weaves of our weavers to the artisans who adds creativity and crafts it with their own hands. It’s the journey which a 7yard fabric takes from a pit loom crossing several small villages and cities and reaches you. It’s a bond of happy weavers and artisans and karigars!!

The Pandemic and the Struggle to Survive:

With scepticism about how the transition of making drapes to eventually selling them would be, the handloom brand that was born in September 2018, got a huge response from buyers across India and soon started shipping overseas through the webstore, www.muslintrail.com . Things were going great when the pandemic broke and halted lives overnight. Shops and stores were asked to shut in March, a month which is meant for sales and stock clearance as well which we call “Chaitra Sale”. 

With news coming everyday from friends settled in Italy and New Jersey, I realised pretty early that this is not going to end soon. This was the time when I thought that in order to survive and provide bread to my family of weavers and karigars, we need to come up with something which is the need of the hour. We started making masks with sarees in early April when no one was doing it and there was a huge demand for it. With all couriers and postal services shut, Initially we delivered only in Kolkata with the help of Swiggy. Soon we started shipping masks across India. 

Timing is the most important factor and when the time was bad, we survived with taking the right move at the right time. Today I can happily say I could retain all my weavers, karigars and employees and stand by them during the worst possible period.

Sales of sarees have dropped immensely and the huge hit is to the bridal pure Zari 1gm Gold Kanjeevarams which are custom made on order. With several weddings getting cancelled and postponed, the sarees are getting dumped with no near future. 

In the current situation with the work still on hold at several units, with no more money left to buy new yarns, we are trying to survive with the help of none other than our own heritage. So now we have incorporated some of the old hand embroideries that women used to do in yesteryear’s (which have been replaced by machine) in our already made sarees. 

Our struggle to survive is on and we are not leaving any stones unturned.